cancer screening services under the NHS?
This question arises yet again with the revelation that even under present arrangements in which only a small percentage of the women most at risk are given cervical smear tests. NHS hospitals have accumulated a huge backlog of work.
Some tests are now being sent to
private laboratories - where the quali y of work has been seriously challeng ed by consultants.
One hospital conducted a quality control exercise which showed an 80% error rate at one private laboratory. Such errors could easily put women's Socialist Viewpoint No. I1 March 1986 pl4
Wendy Savage tality rate is high because of the deprivation ol social conditions.
In contrast, local support for Wendy Savage is high. Mothers have attended lobbies of the trial and the DHA, with children carrying "I'm a Wendy Savage baby" placards. Local health campaigners have only to stand outside local supermarkets with placards saying "Wendy Savage petition" for women to come and queue up to sign.
Wendy Savage is on trial. But the trial is obscenely twisted. Her accusors have chosen cases that they think they can make fit in with their evidence. They have rifled through women's notes and details and have used the information against the will of the patients and, until it became public, without their knowledge. Then they tried to keep the inquiry private for the sake of confidentiality!
Wendy is facing three white men, all bastions of the very establishment lives at risk by failing to detect malignant cells.
Other private labs - which charge £2-E6 per slide - have been known to lose samples altogether.
Error rates in NHS labs average no more than 5% because they recheck smears two or three times each. But some overloaded. understafled NHS hospitals now have as much as 5 months backlog of work.
The DHSS has urged health authorities to check the standards of
vork at the private labs they use: but
DHAs do not have sufficient resources to do this, and there are no safeguards over the staff employed or levels of training given in private labs.
Meanwhile the failure of Hampstead DHA to pay up its £40.000 share of a computerised call and recall system for cervical screening. jeopardising a joint project involving Bloomsbury and Isl-
which she is challenging. She has had to find up to £100,000 for her own defence because even the Medical Defence Union will not pay her costs.
The DHA - which is cutting back on patients' services every month is spending probably close to a quarter of a million pounds to get her out. Even if Wendy wins she will not be able to claim back her costs!
Wendy Savage is indeed on trial -but with по jury. even an "independent" magistrate. The inquiry is more like the Inquisition when women were tried for being witches when all they were doing was fighting for women's rights and treating pregnancies and birth as a perfectly normal function.
If she loses then the cause of community obstetrics will be set back, and women in Tower Hamlets will lose one of their strongest allies.
Wendy Savage has always been a strong campaigner in defence of local health services, and the DHA has forged ahead with cuts and closures during her "well timed" absence. In a District where outpatient gynaeological appointments could take forty weeks, the Maternity Unit at the Mile End Hospital "Wendy's" hospital has been "amalgamated" with that at the London Hospital, Whitechapel, with a number of beds lost on the way. The future of the Day Care Abortion Service within this move - a service Wendy always stoutly defended - is unclear.
Having initially taken no steps to cover Wendy's suspension, the DHA eventually managed to appoint a locum who has recently had to resign. Local health campaigners are asking themselves the question: will Wendy win reinstatement in time to still have a job to come back to? er campaign?
ington, serves to highlight the absence
of any organised campaign or lobby for
screening services. The relatively small
amount of money involved would sure-
ly have been made available (even if at
the expense of a cut elsewhere) if local
women had got together to pressurise
DHA members.
Experts argue that the annual death
toll of 2,000 women from cervical cancer
could be halved if this kind of relatively
cheap and simple system of computeris-
ed call and recall for tests were in-
troduced across the country, backed up
by an expanded laboratory service. At
present only seven DHAs nationwide
operate such a scheme.
The possibilities of establishing a
campaign around this issue will be one
of the matters under discussion at the
Conference called by London Health
Emergency on March 15 at Camden
Town Hall.
IRAN Brutal